Exoplanet transit of TrES-3 attempted tonight

Dave McDonald at Celbridge MPC J65 and Eamonn Ansbro at Kingsland MPC J62 attempted to monitor the transit of an exoplanet of TrES-3 tonight. The exoplanet of TrES-3 was only discovered last year. If our processing is successful, we are hoping to find out the latitude of the planet based on either early or later ingress. There is very little known about this planet.

We both used similar sized telescopes with identical FOVs (25’ x 25’). We also both used photometric R band filters in order improve the detectability of the planet. The R band filter is scientifically useful for determining the planets mass, orbit, etc.

We hope to have the processing started during this week

Eamonn A
MPC J62
www.kingslandobservatory.com

Good luck Eamonn and Dave - look foward to your results later this week?

What started out as a promising night, turned into a bit of a damp squib. The skies cleared around 22:00 and remained clear until just after 23:00.

The predicted transit start time was 23:20 - and of course, the clouds rolled in... I did however manage to get a few images up until about 23:40. The cloud then just got worse and worse right up until transit end - about 00:40. Then of course the cloud started to break a little :roll: I managed a few more shots until I wimped out at about 02:00.

I managed to bag over 150 images of TrES3, hopefully some of those will be within the transit window and hopefully will show some kind of magnitude drop. Given that the drop in the R band is of the order of 0.03 mag, its a tough cookie. However, we'll try our best and will of course let you all know how it goes.

Let the processing begin!

Dave

Well done lads,

Hopefully the processing goes well.
Hope ye got those all important images.

Good Luck Gents ! It's encouraging to see some actual science being done, rather than just reading about it elsewhere.

Keith..

Folks - here's an update.

The data from the transit referred to above (mid March) was pretty much useless since the quality was so poor as a result of atmospherics (clouds ).

However, there was another predicted transit of TrES-3 in the early hours of this morning. The moon was bothersome (sorry moon lovers...) but ended up having little or no impact on measurements.

Whilst this is preliminary data, I'm sure you'd agree that the curve looks pretty decent and rough calculations show that the J65 data corresponds pretty well to the predicted data.

So, once myself, Eamonn and Mike get the data analysed fully, we'll report back.

On an aside, I was pretty surprised to get such a good looking curve to be honest. I still have a bunch of hardware tweeks to do - presumably, the data quality will be better when they are done. I just hope we get a reasonable clear spell before the summer really takes hold...

Cheers
Dave